Me: “Hi, I’d like the eggplant parmesan sandwich, please.”
Employee: “We outta eggs.”
Me: “Oh, no, not egg; I’d like the EGGPLANT sandwich.”
Employee: “WE OUTTA EGGS.”
Me: “But… eggs and eggplant are two different things. Eggplant is a big purple vegetable.”
(The employee shrugs at me, and then turns to his manager.)
Employee: “Hey, we got any eggplant?”
Manager: “Nah, we outta eggs.”
Related:
Egg-xtraordinarily Flip-Plant
Plenty of music services hit you with music your friends like, or find music based on what you already like, but UndergroundMusic.fm has a different mission: To deliver new, fresh music from up and coming bands that put their music on the web for free, hoping fans like you will fall in love with them.
    
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I have to admit that I'm not a fan of Epic Games anymore ever since they decided to make shiny great looking games that are not the best gameplay-wise. I was a huge fan of the original Unreal Tournament and played it for years actively in a clan and in leagues. It was one of the best multiplayer shooters ever released. Imagine my disappointment when the next UT game turned everything upside down. It looked great but played horrible.
Epic Games and Mozilla back in March 2013 released a video preview of Unreal Engine 3 running in the web browser. It looked really great but was only a video and not the real thing. Here is the video that was released in March on YouTube.
If you have watched the video you have probably wondered how the demo would play on your computer, or if you could play it at all on it. The Epic Citadel demonstration has now been released on the Unreal website so that you can find out right now. Head over to the demo page on the Unreal Engine website to start it on your computer right away.
Note that it needs to save more than 50 Megabytes on your PC and that the loading will take a while. You may notice slowdowns while the contents load.
Tip: If you are running the demo in Firefox, use Firefox 22 or newer as it ships with the new JavaScript asm.js component that speeds things up considerable.
The demo itself lets you walk through a medieval town. You can look left and right while you are walking around. Just left-click somewhere on the map to go there and move the mouse to the left or right to look around. You can alternatively take a guided tour. If you do, you walk around on the map automatically so that you can lean back and enjoy the graphics.
If you run the demo in fullscreen, you do get an option to run a benchmark (my two year old PC got an average FPS of 58.5 on a 1920x1200 resolution in Firefox 23, not bad at all.
If you open the demo page in any other browser you will receive a notification that the browser is currently not supported. You can run the demo anyway but should consult the FAQ page first. Chrome for instance crashes currently and Internet Explorer does not support WebGL in current versions. Basically, Firefox is the browser to try the demo in right now.
Firefox users can remove the 60 frames per second cap the demo runs in currently. The following needs to be done to do so:
The Citadel demo shows how powerful HTML5 really is. While it may still take a years before we will see a major game releases in HTML5, it can certainly be said that the outlook is promising.
The post Play Epic Games Citadel Demo in your web browser appeared first on gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials.
Playing the Game is a poem from an ‘Anonymous’ author. I find it hard to believe that such a great poem has no author. Does anyone know who the real source is? Thanks to Colin for submitting it.
This comic is a continuation of the Poetic Justice saga. You can read the previous instalments featuring the same boy and his father in the following comics:
PART 1 Invictus
PART 2 If
PART 3 O Me! O Life!
PART 4 A Bird Came Down the Walk
I don’t have a name for the boy so I’ll just take a leaf from one of my favourite authors, Cormac McCarthy, and call him ‘the kid’.
Markus 'Notch' Persson, best known for the mega-hit Minecraft and his affinity for fedoras, has released a free browser-based typing game entitled Drop.
Drop: Notch's free, browser-based typing game laughs at your keyboard skills originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Now, wait until I tell you what's in it first! Put down the mug and let me describe Barbara Kiebel's breakfast treat. It has Maker's Mark bourbon, vanilla ice cream, scratch whipped cream made with bourbon and scratch hot fudge made with espresso and coffee liqueur. Okay, now you can drink.
Link -via Tasteologie
This is a series of chair paintings that look like ordinary canvases but are actually made out of an elastic material and have a wooden frame behind them so you can sit IN the painting. They were designed by the Japanese design studio YOY and would be the perfect thing to put in a gallery with a big 'DO NOT TOUCH' sign, then secretly film people who know what's up sitting in them, much to the surprise and confusion of other gallery patrons. Come on, that has shitty viral video written all over it.
Hit the jump for a couple more shots.“The only idea more overused than serial killers is multiple personality,” says screenwriter Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, which is, in Wikipedia’s parlance, “a 2002 American semi-autobiographical drama metafilm,” and which has nothing else to do with this article except mentioning multiple personality disorder and being seriously pretty much like the best movie ever.
Kaufman has a point, though; our culture has been having a bit of a love affair with multiple personality disorder (also known as Dissociative Identity Disorder) for the last several years – as well as certain other mental illnesses that many writers seem to understand equally poorly. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, because in one way it’s important and a sign of progress that characters with mental health issues are appearing in popular artworks at all (especially when they’re not portrayed as bad guys), since it’s a subject that’s fraught with a great deal of stigma and outright denial in our society. And that doesn’t help anybody, even aside from being unrealistic. But on the other hand, exploiting mental illness, particularly when the writer in question doesn’t have a good idea of what a person with some specific condition would actually be like in real life, can be quite harmful and risks counteracting the work of those trying to educate the public and make people realize that those with diagnoses of mental illness are not a crowd of violent, slobbering lunatics but are in fact human beings, like everyone else, with their own problems and struggles.
But the reason that mental illness is increasingly becoming such a popular trope is that it has some very powerful metaphorical force. To the extent that mental illness can symbolize internal conflict and the clash between perception and reality, it is a useful tool for dramatizing themes that may otherwise be too subtle or intangible to make for exciting action or accessible comedy that mainstream art demands.
Looking at a few examples of the portrayal of mental illness across different media and genres, we can see not only what the author intended to express by its use, but also see what works and why, hopefully thereby presenting the beginning of a guide both for analysis of the trope and advice on how best to use it when creating an artwork that seems to demand it.
In Fight Club, both the original novel by Chuck Palahniuk and the film adaptation (not to be confused with the film Adaptation, aforementioned) directed by David Fincher, the unnamed protagonist (referred to for convenience as Jack) spawns an alter ego named Tyler Durden. The Jack/Tyler dichotomy personifies the tension-unto-cognitive-dissonance in the mind of the protagonist (and, according to the author and reflected in the slow-burning but persistent popularity of the novel and movie) between modern Western civilization’s strong valuation of capitalist materialism, physical comfort, and general superficiality on one hand, and the inborn desire for meaningful work, creative destruction or destructive creativity, and clearly defined basic societal goals on the other. These seemingly contradictory forces are categorized in terms of femininity versus masculinity, with the world as it is being portrayed as alienatingly feminine to the male protagonist, with the outburst of Tyler from Jack’s psyche symbolizing the inevitable overflow of suppressed masculinity into consciousness out of the subconscious.
The use of Multiple Personality Disorder makes the symbolism stand out, but Fight Club complicates the dichotomy it establishes in the first two acts with the events of the third. We have the thesis—that society has become stiflingly “feminized”—in the first act, followed by the antithesis—that the solution to this is to overthrow society by performing acts of “masculinity,” which are inevitably violent and subversive. The third act appropriately synthesizes the two opposing views; ultimately Jack rejects Tyler’s hypermasculine nihilism and, paradoxically, destroys the self-destructive part of himself that Tyler represents. But at the same time, Jack has by that time incorporated enough of Tyler’s extroversion and craving for reality over simple appearance to allow him to take decisive action in attempting to stop Tyler’s plans to physically destroy the city’s credit card companies, and also to find the courage to genuinely reach out to his love interest, Marla Singer, and try to create a real emotional connection between them without a constant need to couch everything in irony and hold back the vulnerability required for functional human relationships.
Woah, that was a hell of a run-on sentence. I’m going to leave it in there, though, and blame it on one of my other personalities.
So that’s how Fight Club used Multiple Personalities: to illustrate the sort of right brain/left brain, male/female nature that human beings are usually only vaguely aware of, if at all. And it works. But that’s only one possible expression of the disorder. In clinically diagnosed MPD patients, most of them display fewer than ten distinct identities, but there have apparently been cases where one person had up to 4,500! An identity that’s split in two works well when you are only trying to negotiate a dualistic sense of self, but what if your concern is more with the fragmentation of ourselves into countless different and often contradictory pieces?
In Marvel Comics, this is the position of the character David Haller, also known as Legion. David Haller is the illegitimate son of Professor Charles Xavier, founder and leader of the mutant superhero team the X-Men. Prior to forming the X-Men, Professor Xavier travelled to Israel to collaborate with a friend who operated a psychiatric hospital for the treatment of Holocaust survivors suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other mental health issues. Using his strong telepathic powers, Xavier managed to successfully repair the mind of a patient there, Gabrielle Haller, who had been catatonic for years; after her recovery, they subsequently began a relationship. The two of them parted as friends, and Charles returned to the United States, but Gabrielle chose not to reveal that she had become pregnant. She went on to become a United Nations ambassador, and raise her and Charles’s son, whom she named David.
Cool hair is also one of his powers.
Later in life, a traumatic incident caused David’s powers to manifest but also his mind to shatter. What’s interesting is that the writers of X-Men could never seem to agree on what was actually wrong with Legion. At one point he was described as autistic. Later, as schizophrenic. And most recently, as having multiple personalities. These are all obviously very different conditions with vastly divergent symptoms, but they’ve all been attributed to Legion and have been treated at various times as more or less interchangeable. From a psychological and neurological standpoint, this demonstrates either shoddy research or simple carelessness. But narratively, Legion has to serve the purpose that the writer wants the story to take. At first it was assumed that David’s mind “absorbed” the personalities of others around him, particularly people who had died in traumatic ways. Currently, Legion is being written as having genuinely thousands of distinct personalities living inside his brain, each one possessing a different mutant power, and all of them vying for permanent control of his body, with David having to exert a great deal of effort to remain dominant, and an even greater strain to “overpower” one or more of the personalities if he wants to use their powers. It’s implied that if he could learn to control all his personalities as once, David would be one of the most powerful beings in the universe.
Let’s look at some of the narratological implications of that. Whereas in Fight Club the main tension was between order/chaos, comfort/action, female/male, the issues dealt with in X-Men, especially when it comes to stories about Legion, are far more multifarious. Legion’s identity—quite apart from his multiple personalities—is torn between numerous often conflicting poles rather than only two. David’s father is an American born into a wealthy family; his mother is a European-Israeli Holocaust survivor with deep traumas of her own. He was born in Haifa, then moved to Paris, and spent much of his life in Scotland. Ideologically, he is similarly torn. His father is the world’s most prominent mutant rights advocate, professing a philosophy of mutual cooperation between humans and mutants, who founded a school dedicated to training young mutants in the use of their powers and protecting the status quo against both mutants and humans who would seek to destabilize it. Xavier’s beneficence, however, is drastically undermined in David’s conception by the fact of his (Xavier’s) utter absence for most of his son’s life, and his extremely ambivalent behavior toward David even after he learned of the child’s existence. For someone who had devoted his life to helping mutants, Charles Xavier managed to help his own son precious little.
Charles Xavier’s oldest friend and greatest foe, Magneto, also had a great impact on Legion’s conception of human-mutant relationships. Magneto, a “mutant supremacist” type, worked with Xavier and David’s step-father, Daniel Shomron, at the institution where his mother had been committed. Magneto’s “proactive” approach to mutant rights seems to have influenced David’s thinking – Legion is rarely portrayed as a hero; at best, he is an anti-hero, well-meaning but either incapable or unwilling to follow his father’s example, even if he shares his dream. Indeed, when Legion awoke with the power of time travel, he went back in time in an attempt to kill Magneto before he could become a supervillain; something that he believed his father should have done a long time ago, or at any point since, but who had refused to do so out of what Legion considered a misguided sense of mercy. Of course, Legion ended up accidentally killing Xavier in the past rather than Magneto, leading to the alternate-universe “Age of Apocalypse.”
Legion’s problem is, in large part, an issue of crippling empathy. He sympathizes, quite against his will, with a number of divergent and often mutually exclusive identities and ideals. Aside from the complicated nature of his nationality, he is incapable of successfully navigating the cognitive dissonance that comes from the multiplicity of viewpoints he has come into contact with throughout his life. When he was young, the embassy in Paris at which his mother worked was attacked by terrorists, and his step-father was killed. For the first time, David’s powers manifested; not only did he deliberately incinerate the attackers, but he also quite unintentionally absorbed the mind of the terrorist leader. Legion was later shown to also absorbed the minds of the mutants Karma and Magik, as well as a young human girl named Marci.
So we see that, whatever sort of psychological condition the writers choose to call it, Legion’s fractured consciousness is a result of fragmentation from both inside and outside himself simultaneously. The broken, decidedly post-WWII world into which David Haller emerged and which his disordered mind represents is a place where we are expected not only to contend with the inevitably hybrid identity with which we are born, but also to consider the subjective experiences and contradictory narratives of our allies and opponents as well. In a clash between conservative or even reactionary, objective forces that impel us to assert our personality upon the world as we find it, and a more multicultural, multi-perspective subjectivity, where we’re practically coerced into empathizing with groups oppressed by the majority, with alternative majorities elsewhere in the world with whom we have varying degrees of contact and understanding, and even the history (or histories) of our own society (or societies) whose narratives we think (or hope) that we’ve outgrown…
Well, that ridiculous last couple of sentences ought to give you some idea of what Legion’s got to deal with. It’s a hell of a confusing way to live, and it makes it impossible to know not only what to believe, and what’s the right thing to do, but even who we are.
(In his current ongoing series, X-Men: Legacy, David is feeling a lot better, by the way, thanks for asking.)
To Be Continued…
The Mind is the Medium: Mental Illness in Pop Culture, Part 1 originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]
This is the impressive 4-ton steampunk train barbeque grill built by Ryazan Deulino. The barbeque features three separate cooking bays and a brick-lined furnace (all of which make great hide & seek hiding places). Man, this thing looks perfect for grilling up some of my famous choo-choo chicken. Okay fine, there's no such thing as my famous choo-choo chicken. If we're being honest, I'm not really famous for anything. Although one time at a friend's b-day I managed to burp half the Happy Birthday song and people talked about it for a few days, so there's that.
Hit the jump for a couple more shots of the impressiveness.
Note: The Geekologie Writer does not condone cheating (on tests OR lovers) and managed to make his way through high school, undergrad, and a master's degree and he's dumb as shit so come on, if he can do it, so can you. Sure I failed the hell out of some tests, but you know what? I did it in a blaze of glory and HONOR.
Just in time for exams comes the White Weasel editable and printable Aquafina cheat-sheet bottle label (note: not a new concept). You just go to the website, replace the label text with the info you need for your exam, print it out, glue it to a water bottle, and PRESTO, you passed a test you didn't really deserve to. Dare you to glue it to a Mountain Dew Bottle.
Thanks to Chris From Back Hand, who agrees the best way to pass a test is to stay up for two nights cramming for it, regurgitating all that info on test day, then promptly forgetting every bit of it. Ah, college.
Super Mario Crossover upgrades to version 3.0 originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 28 Apr 2013 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Because it's Friday and we all started drinking at lunch (we did all start drinking at lunch, right?), here's an Angry Birds wrecking ball spotted in the wild by Redditor bmorschwack. I don't know about you, but come Monday morning I'm gonna be praying I see that thing outside my window swinging right towards me.
Thanks to ChaosLex, who's been killing it with the tips lately, and robobear, who's just been killing everything in its path.
This is the 20-foot long (it looks longer to me but I've ridden real dinosaurs though so I should know) balloon animal Acrocanthosaurus built by balloon-twisting professional (and awesome dude to have at a kid's birthday party) Larry Moss and his team at Airigami for Virginia's Museum of Natural History. Because if there's two things kids like, it's balloons and dinosaurs. If there's three things kids like, it's balloons, dinosaurs, and eating their own boogers. *licking finger* Like homemade Play-Doh.
Hit the jump for several more shots and a time-lapse of the dinosaur being made. Which, for the record, is nothing like how God did it (he was into clay).CaryFuck, Roger Ebert is a fantastic writer. Sometimes I find his reviews to be far more entertaining than the film itself LOL
This is my new photograph titled LAST STAND.
It depicts a family about to be consumed by a horde of zombies.
The star of the photo is A. Michael Baldwin from the classic Horror movie Phantasm (1979).
The little girl is my niece Thea, who was also the baby in my photo SNAKE.
The mom was played by Erica Kauffman.
The other child victim was played by my daughter Sadie.
We built our set at the 3rd St. Asylum Haunted House in Bonner Springs, Kansas. My cousins Jerry and Steve Hoffine did all of the carpentry and construction.
Bill Rose and his girlfriend Michelle stayed up late one night to wallpaper my set for me.
Here you can see Steve and Bill measuring the shag carpet.
I filled the set with my gathered props. Jerry Hoffine and Mike Clouse destroyed the door by jumping on it.
Here you can see me talking with J. Anthony Kosar, who drove in from Chicago to lead the make-up team. Beside me is my assistant Demian Vela, and behind us is Colin Mogg, one of my zombie models.
Kosar’s sculpted appliances were marvelous.
Meagan Hester flew in from NYC to help Kosar with the make-up effects.
Make-up artist Jeff Sisson also came in to help. Here you can see him working on Demian Vela.
My wife Jen Hoffine, who played the title role in LADY BATHORY, also played a zombie.
My favorite model Bob Barber came in to be a zombie as well.
Brian Wendling, the man walking the tightrope in my early photograph DEATH, played one of the zombies attacking my daughter Sadie.
Brenna Hoch and her mom Rita also helped with the make-up.
My star A. Michael Baldwin on set.
Me with my daughter Sadie on set.
My brother-in-law Felix Mercader helped run camera.
Zombie Davis DeRock biting Erica’s arm as she reaches for her pistol.
Theodis Williams made the coolest zombie of all.
See you next time!
I started using Reader November 30, 2005, a bit over a month after the product was launched (according to the Official Reader Blog).
I remember using Bloglines as my RSS reader of choice before Reader, trying out the new service, hating the “lens” design, and going back to Bloglines. It wasn’t until September 2006, nearly a year later, that I returned after the (first) big redesign, and never looked back.
When I joined Google in 2007, Reader was the product I wanted to work on more than anything else, and I was fortunate enough to be able to work with the amazing team before it was put into maintenance mode in 2010.
It’s obvious why I care, but to many people, the widespread passion around Reader’s shutdown seems strange - why do we care? Who uses feed readers anymore in a world of Twitter and Facebook?
Reader started out as an RSS reader, but it in no way needed to be only an RSS reader. RSS is only the infrastructure that delivers information (which is why Dave Winer is fine to hate on Reader as one of many clients) - it could just as easily have been augmented with Twitter, Facebook, and G+. Except for one problem: this was Google, and it doesn’t take a particularly astute observer of history to see how well Google plays with Twitter or Facebook.
So Reader was caught in a catch-22 of sorts. It needed to grow or die, but in order to grow it needed to expand beyond the scope of RSS to include the other forms of rapidly growing information consumption… that Google was unable to work with (and in Facebook’s case, didn’t want to share). Doing so would also require significantly more resources and an expansion of scope for the product.
Reader vs Twitter & Facebook
Comparing the usage/growth of a product that was an afterthought at Google, and hasn’t been staffed for three years with Twitter and Facebook is silly. Imagine if (somewhat absurdly) Google had decided to invest the resources of G+ into a product like Reader. Calling Reader a niche product isn’t an argument against Reader, it’s an argument against the staffing and support it received throughout its life.
I’ve always been confused why a company with the mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” never valued a product that did that on very personal level. Particularly in a world of increasing information overload, a product designed to take in a variety of sources and present them efficiently and cleanly certainly seems like it would provide value. One friend told me he had replaced Reader by using Twitter, Facebook, Techmeme, and Reddit, which sounds terrifying to me.
Judging by the growth of products like Zite and Prismatic (I use both of these), people are searching for a way to have relevant and interesting information (minus the friend updates, etc) surfaced for them in a way that Twitter and Facebook are pretty bad at. Reader served this through recommended and shared items, but also provided a way for users to explicitly declare what they wanted to see.
Reader provides a carefully controlled environment where you only see things you explicitly care about. No ads. No friend requests. Flexible UI that adapts to your reading style[1]. You might argue that the same content exists on Twitter or Facebook, but they don’t lend themselves to the same kind of publishing, and the UI is cluttered with a myriad of unrelated features and content.
Mike Elgan sums it up nicely:
In fact, Twitter is not a big RSS reader. RSS is something you control, and Twitter is something other people control. (Even if you dedicate a Twitter account exclusively to the same sources of content you had in Google Reader, the viewing options, functionality and everything about Twitter is controlled by Twitter.) That both give you streams of content is a superficial similarity. Fundamentally, they are opposites.
What Google Reader and RSS fans fear is not the loss of a good service and a great format. They fear the loss of control. They fear a future in which decisions about what they see, watch, read and listen to are determined by secret algorithms and the whims of the social media masses.
In the end, there isn’t much to say about the decision itself. Google’s effort to focus makes a lot of sense, and killing a product that wasn’t doing anything fits that, even if it was a self-inflicted stagnation. I think a lot of people’s frustrations are stemming from feeling like Reader was (to them) such an obviously useful and beloved product, and an accompanying sense of outrage and confusion over why Google doesn’t understand that.
For me, I’ve known that Google either hasn’t understood or cared about Reader for years. I’m less sad for the loss of a product that I loved, and more for the loss of what it could have been, given the proper investment. The bright side is that there are now lots of people out there thinking (and working) on that future. Let’s just hope they don’t get acquired by Google.
Notes
A federal jury has found Nintendo guilty of infringing on the 3D display patent of Seijiro Tomita of Tomita Technologies, awarding Tomita $30.2 million in damages.Nintendo loses lawsuit over 3DS patent infringement originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
This is a Mystery Science Theater 3000 themed wall decal featuring the silhouettes of Tom Servo, Joel and Crow T. Robot made to appear like they're sitting a row behind you on the couch. They're not really though, it's just a $35 sticker for sale from Walkingdeadpromotion. Don't feel like putting it behind the couch? Put it behind the toilet. Just don't come crying to me when they all start ragging on your bathroom habits. I've been saying it for years, robots are mean.
Thanks to beeps, who agrees if you can ever avoid having someone sitting behind you during a movie, you go for that option.
Seneca the Younger (4BC – AD65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on stoicism because I’m definitely not. Feel free to discuss stoicism and its pros and cons in the comments. Maybe I’ll learn a thing or two.
The Shaolin Monk returns for his third comic adventure! If you’re a new reader, he’s sort of the unofficial mascot of Zen Pencils. Think Mickey Mouse for Disney or Pikachu for Pokémon, except he would totally kick their butts (well, maybe not Pikachu). He’s previously appeared in Always Be Prepared and The Brick Walls.
The background images in the comic were taken from old Chinese scroll paintings sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
- Last week’s Chris Hadfield ‘An astronaut’s advice’ comic is now available as a print! The Hadfield family has very kindly given me permission to sell them.
